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In September 2020, we analyzed the major challenges that IT organizations face when managing current mission-critical infrastructures. Security issues, high costs, and difficulties in updating their environments were top of mind. Conversely, the move to the cloud has been helpful in addressing many of these hurdles. In fact, customers who completed the transition often cite the following benefits:

  • Improved security and compliance.
  • Better performance and lower latency of mission-critical systems.
  • Faster infrastructure implementation times.
  • Greater agility (due to the opportunity to modernize existing systems while developing new capabilities).

Additionally, when organizations rely on the cloud to run their core business processes, they can capitalize on significant operational advantages. This is particularly true in a climate of uncertainty. That is also why the rate at which organizations continue to migrate their applications to the cloud is not slowing down, and that includes business-critical applications.

A broad range of business-critical applications

We have also observed how the spectrum of mission and business-critical applications has continued to broaden and evolve beyond traditional systems of record. We see this pattern across virtually every industry as they advance their digital transformation initiatives.

During the upcoming webinar miniseries Insights and Practices to Run Business-Critical Apps on Azure, I will ask a few customers and independent software vendor (ISVs), who have embraced Azure as the platform to deliver core business-critical applications, to share with us the experiences they have accumulated during their cloud journey. To better help customers, we also want to understand how these unprecedented times have influenced cloud migration priorities on a broader scale. To that end, we will bring you updated market research insights from Forrester, in addition to authentic perspectives from your industry peers.

During this three-part Azure webinar miniseries, you will be able to:

  • Hear from Forrester about the critical success factors you should consider when building your cloud migration strategy for business-critical applications.
  • Discover how to continuously improve the resiliency and performance of business-critical applications at scale with the latest innovations we are making available on Azure.
  • Review real-world examples, reference architectures, and learn best practices from Riversand, Teradata, and Unit4.

Part 1: Transition your business-critical applications to the cloud

During the first webinar, our guest speaker, Tracy Woo, Senior Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations at Forrester Research, will share the latest market trends gathered during the past few months. I will also present some of the capabilities that Microsoft has recently introduced in Azure to help customers accelerate the deployment of business-critical applications to the cloud. During this session, we will focus on scalability, security, compliance, and availability. To bring all this information into the context of actual customer environments, we will then have a panel discussion with Riversand executives. We will learn how they have been using the capabilities that Azure offers to deploy their master data management and product information management solutions.

Part 2: Scale your data analytics platform based on demand in Azure

We often speak only about business-critical applications, but data is as critical if not more critical than the application itself. During the second webinar, we will invite Teradata subject matter experts to review proven methodologies to help you manage the performance of your large data warehouse environments in Azure. Teradata has been delivering cloud-based data warehousing, business intelligence, and data analytics solutions to enterprises for several years. Our featured speakers will review several aspects associated with Teradata Vantage, including their security capabilities, how they tackle hybrid cloud deployments, scalability factors, and additional recommendations for cloud-based data analytics platforms. I will also present the latest innovation we brought to market with new Azure Disk Storage capabilities, including shared disks and how you can scale disk storage performance up and down for your critical applications with no downtime.

Part 3: Run your ERP solutions on Azure to increase security, availability, and compliance

Finally, when you think of mission-critical applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems often come to mind first. For the past several years, Unit4 has been delivering modern ERP software solutions in industries including professional services, public sector, nonprofit, and education. Unit4’s CTO will join us, bringing along proven best practices, guidance, and authentic perspectives. How Unit4 guides their customers’ deployment strategies is also of importance. We will hear about their cloud journey, from a lift-and-shift IaaS-based strategy to cloud-native microservices-based environments. I will also present the latest Azure capabilities that we are making available to customers to help them continuously improve the security, compliance, and resiliency of their business-critical applications, including the ability to encrypt your data while in use. 

During these three sessions, we will take online questions from the audience to cover related areas of particular interest.

Register now

Register now to attend the webinar series, rich in unique insights and authentic discussions with members of our growing Azure community.

In addition, we invite you to participate in an exclusive Forrester Consulting survey, commissioned by Microsoft, to share how your organization is thinking about its mission-critical apps. Upon completion of the miniseries, all survey participants will be given a free report of the aggregated and anonymized results.

Join the discussion. I am looking forward to these upcoming sessions.

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